


Into the Land of Wild Things

by InsaneBlueGenius



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Jackson returns, Nature Magic, Not Season/Series 03 Compliant, Nymph Stiles, Thunderstorms
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-21
Updated: 2013-08-21
Packaged: 2017-12-24 05:34:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/936000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InsaneBlueGenius/pseuds/InsaneBlueGenius
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles doesn't really remember a lot of details about his mother outside of time spent in her garden or with her as she wasted away in the hospital. As a kid he never had a reason to think too hard about how much time she spent outdoors.<br/>He thought that there couldn't be anything else weird to deal with after Scott is bitten and he ends up as a human member of a pack of werewolves. He was wrong about a lot of things, especially the part about him being human.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Into the Land of Wild Things

**Author's Note:**

> Probably eventually Sterek, but it will be more about Stiles being a part of the pack. I will add tags as I add chapters

As a child, Stiles really didn’t think too hard about anything. His teachers and his doctors had told him that he was smart but that he also had an attention problem and they’d started him on medication, it seemed to help but there was just so much to look at! He always wanted to pay attention to everything at once, especially when he was outside with his mother.

Claudia Stilinski was a very energetic woman, she was one of the only people who had never had a problem keeping up with her son. Maybe that was because they were a lot alike or maybe that was just how mothers worked, he didn’t know, he didn’t think too hard about it. When Stiles was just learning to walk she had discovered that he was calmest outside, just like she was. Stiles had taken his first steps in the grass in the backyard. At seventeen, the clearest memories he has of his mother are outside or in the hospital.

He remembers being four years old and his mother sitting with him under her favorite tree. She was telling him about the sapling she’d planted when she found out she was pregnant and how trees needed help as they grew, just like children.

He remembers coming home from Kindergarten at five and not bothering to go inside because he knew she’d be in the garden out back. She was on her knees in the dirt and surrounded by flowers when he told her that he’d made a new friend and the he was going to keep him forever. He remembers her grinning with a smudge of dirt on her cheek as he told her about Scott for the first time and replied that Stiles should invite him over after school one day.

He remembers being taught how to properly water the garden when he was six. How not to cause puddles to form everywhere and which plants needed more or less water. He got distracted more than a few times that summer by the sprinkler and ended up running around the yard with his mother instead. His dad came home more than once to them laughing on the back porch damp with mud splatters all the way up their legs.

He remembers finding out that the sapling mom had planted for him had beautiful colorful flowers at seven. She’d nudge him and simply said, “Of course, it had to be as pretty as my boy.” Her favorite tree was always covered in pale purple blossoms and Stiles can remember asking why his tree had different colors. His mother had laughed and kissed him on the cheek, “Because you are a very colorful person, my Stiles.”

He remembers picking vegetables in the backyard and helping his mother cook them and helping her pick out flowers every few days to put on the table inside. He remembers walking in the woods with her and when she would point out different plants and trees to him. He’d ask every question that popped into his head, and she always answered them with a smile, no matter how strange the question or how obvious the answer. He remembers sitting in the grass and looking up at the sky to watch the clouds, standing outside in summer storms and his mother telling him that Mother Nature was taking care of her children whenever it rained. Sometimes he thinks that the year he was eight was the best year.

He remembers when she got sick and how he stopped finding her in the garden after school every day because sometimes she was at doctor’s appointments. She didn’t plant as many flowers that year, but he wasn’t worried until it was late spring when he realized that her tree barely had any blooms on it. He sat underneath it and cried until his father found him and brought him inside. He spent most of the rest of spring out in the garden when he wasn’t following his parents to doctor’s appointments. He kept hoping that maybe if he kept the plants growing, his mother would get better.

When his mother went into the hospital, he brought her flowers from the garden, just one or two every time he came to visit. They always made her smile, she seemed happy that he was taking care of her garden, so he kept doing it. It was something to focus on, something to distract him from how she looked like she was slowly wasting away. He would spend the afternoon in the garden and then he’d bring flowers to the hospital and sit with his mother until his dad took him home to bed. He remembers Scott sitting with him in the garden, trying to help. He remembers his dad trying to help with things he was too small to handle. He remembers the smell of fresh flowers doing their best to hide the scent of hospital and medicine.

His mother died late one evening while his father was working. All he can remember after her fading away is how he didn’t cry. He felt like he was wilting like the flowers in his mother’s room. His father found him collapsed in a chair in the hallway with his head in his hands.

Stiles didn’t really cry at the funeral or afterwards at the house. He just felt numb. He would sit in the garden and stare at the plants instead of doing anything. He watched the flowers fade away, watched them fall off of the two trees that had been side by side for the last nine years.

He had avoided going out in the garden by late summer, it hurt too much to be there without his mother. He could see the two flowering trees from the kitchen and his mother’s had started to look sickly. He’d avoided even looking out the window after that.

Stiles didn’t cry until the fall. His mother had been gone for a few months and neither he nor his father was coping well. Then there was the storm, pouring rain, thunder, lightning, high winds. Stiles felt like Mother Nature was just as upset about his mother being gone as he was. This is how he ended up outside on their back porch as the rain whipped around him. He watched his mother’s favorite tree bend in the wind, leaning dangerously close to the ground towards the woods. It fell when a huge gust of wind took it down. Stiles started crying when it fell, his mother’s tree that they’d spent so much time under, where she’d taught him about other trees and plants, where they’d had picnics after long walks in the woods, was gone. It was gone just like she was. His father found him soaking wet and crying sitting in the mud that was once his mother’s garden.

The year that Stiles was ten they didn’t plant any flowers. The tree his mother had planted for him seemed to have forgotten that it was ever meant to flower and Stiles stayed out of the garden as much as possible. He spent more and more time over Scott’s house finding other forms of distraction so he wouldn’t have to think about what it was like before it was just him and his father.

The tree didn’t bloom again until Stiles was sixteen.


End file.
